The High-School Course 'Design Your Future' at d.tech Adopts OFMOS® This Fall
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We’re happy to announce our collaboration with Design Your Future, a career exploration and design-thinking course at Design Tech High School (d.tech), a tuition-free public charter high school on Oracle’s campus in Redwood City, California.
Developed and led by veteran educator Nathan Pierce, Design Your Future helps students build self-direction, adaptability, and future-facing skills. As part of this collaboration, students will engage with our tabletop simulation OFMOS® Essential and the learning solution Strategy at the Individual Level.
More to come.
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Strategic Agency: What the First-Principles Theories Behind OFMOS® Point To
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The better AI gets at the doing, the more the choosing matters: what to pursue, what to hand off, what stays yours. That is strategic agency — strategic thinking, by its everyday name. We loaded the foundational theories behind OFMOS® into the LLM Claude (Opus 5; August 22, 2026) — fresh chat, memory off, paper attached, nothing else — and gave it one prompt.
The prompt and the reply are below, unedited. Neither the prompt nor the reply uses the phrase “strategic agency,” and the prompt never mentions AI. The reply gets to both anyway: it brings AI in as a tool, and it lands on what can’t be handed off.
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PROMPT:
Using only the attached paper for your derivation and reply, and without accessing your memory, write a brief for an essay on a high school student's approach to day-to-day decision-making. What increases in importance over time, and why? Use a vocabulary and style accessible to high-school students. 500 words max.
REPLY:
Essay brief
Working title: Getting good at the wrong things
Thesis. A high school student is already making strategic choices every day — the paper's claim is that everyone is a strategist whether they use the word or not. What grows in importance over time is not skill at the choices they already make well. It is holding a working understanding of how things work before results can confirm it, and keeping the biggest goals loose enough to change.
Section 1 — Every small choice sits under a bigger one.
Set up the paper's picture: goals sit in a tree, each bigger goal setting the terms for the smaller ones under it, all of it under one top goal — the student's own idea of a life that goes well. Use the paper's own example: a student who has picked a degree doesn't choose courses at random; the degree decides which ones come up at all. Point out that a need, a goal, and a decision are the same thing here.
Section 2 — Daily routines get easier and count for less.
A choice repeated day after day becomes a routine. As you learn it, the need it serves gets pushed lower and matters less to you — the paper calls this the downward push. Two traps worth naming: you feel more fluent while the thing you're fluent at is worth less, and that fluency concentrates exactly where value is thinning. So "get better at your current habits" is not the answer to what grows.
Section 3 — What grows: understanding held in advance.
This is the core of the essay, straight from the paper. Short pursuits return results fast, so you can correct as you go and don't need much figured out beforehand. Long pursuits — a degree, a career, a friendship kept for years — return too little, too late. A life holds too few of those returns to learn from. The understanding has to be in place before any result can confirm it. That is why reading, and grasping why things work rather than what to do, matters more as the pursuits get longer.
Section 4 — What grows: keeping the top goal blurry.
Counterintuitive and worth the space. Specific goals work well down where you act. Made too sharp too high up, they narrow what you can come up with when conditions change. A broad goal generates more options; a pinned-down one generates one.
Section 5 — What grows: what can't be handed off.
Tools, including AI, can help build almost any part of the tree. But the higher the goal, the less anyone else can supply, because it's the student's reading of their own life. Also: putting a goal into words sharpens it, so the more you outsource upward, the more gets lost in the handing over.
Close. Two things speed this up, per the paper: doing it on purpose, and actually reading how it turned out. Growth starts with no new skill — only with noticing what you were already doing.
Constraint: plain words throughout; define "routine" and "goal tree" the first time; no term used before it's explained.
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The Foundational Theories:
One-Need Theory of Behavior & Ofmos Theory of Business
(PDF; updated August 22, 2026)
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The Tabletop Experience Puts the Teacher at the Center
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The analog, in-person experience and the “orrery of business” mechanics of OFMOS® Essential keep students present and engaged in both their social interactions and their strategizing. With it, the teacher’s role shifts from distributor and evaluator of information to designer of situations where students must exercise judgment.
OFMOS® Essential can be played as an abstract game or as a simulation. The simulation runs at any of the five levels of The Five Business Big Pictures, each with its own learning solution: Strategy at the Individual Level, Strategy at the Augmenting Technology Level, Strategy at the Product Level (the focus of the standard rulebook), Strategy at the Company Level, and Strategy at the Economy Level. Choosing the level is the teacher’s first design decision.
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The Rulebook of OFMOS® Essential
(PDF; 2026 edition)
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